I read this today from Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart:
“We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong…. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to make us feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft and open and tender in ourselves Rather than own pain we scramble to find some comfortable ground.”
In the pinball machine that is my mind, this sent me immediately to a song I had not listened to in a while – Jesus Was a Capricorn, by Kris Kristofferson, which includes this unfortunately timely rendition (though the song is nearly fifty years old) of (at least in my mind) this same concept Chodron was discussing.
“Some folks hate the whites, who hate the blacks, who hate the klan
Most of us hate anything that we don’t understand
“Cause everybody’s got have something to look down on
Who they can feel better than at anything they please
Someone doing something dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can find nobody else, then help yourself to me.”
There they are, blame and looking down on others – two tried and true, imperfect, even hideous methods to make myself feel better. UGH!
It occurs to me... 